Skip to main content

Fixed, non optional costs

I don't fly Ryanair anymore.

I flew to Stockholm once with them and the flight landed- six hours late- at Vesteras, which is about as far from Stockholm as Bristol is from London. I did not actually arrive in the centre of the Swedish capital until 3 AM.

But apart from terrible service, uncomfortable planes and the sense that the ONLY thing that matters is the price, it has always been hard to avoid the idea that Ryanair is a massive rip-off.

Although advertised as a flight for a Pound, or Ten Pounds or whatever, the fact is that this is never the amount that you pay. Taxes, Landing fees, etc always add several Pounds, and these are of course fixed and non-optional costs. So it strikes me that Ryanair are misleading the public; or to use the preferred idiom of the company, they are liars. Therefore I am not surprised to see the ASA are investigating the company, yet again. As usual, the company shrilly attacks its detractors in the most robust language.

But let us go through this again. The passenger pays a price for the ticket, but must also pay the fixed, non optional taxes and fees. Quite often, they may also pay to check-in bags, and pay if not using the Internet check-in. Then sit for a few hours in an uncomfortable seat, packed in, with no service to arrive at a destination nowhere close to where they intend to get to, and pay more for onward land transport.

Actually, if it is all the same to you, I will stick to full service airlines- they can often even be cheaper than Ryanair and they don't treat their customers as an inconvenience.

Comments

Edis said…
The airline industry acronym for passengers is, of course, 'SMF' which stands for 'Self-Moving Freight'...

Popular posts from this blog

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop...

One Year On

  Head vabariigi iseseisvuspäeva! Happy Estonian Independence Day! It is one year since I stood outside the Estonian Parliament for the traditional raising of the national flag from Tall Hermann tower. Looking at the young fraternities gathered with their flags, I was very sure that Estonia too would soon be facing the aggression of the criminal Russian regime. A tragic and dark day. 5 eyes intelligence had been clear: an all out invasion was going to happen, and Putin´s goals included- and still include- "restoration" of Russian imperial power across Europe, even to the Atlantic. Yet there was one Western intelligence failure: we all underestimated the guts of the Ukrainian armed forces, the ZSU, and its President and people. One year on, Estonia, and indeed all the front line states against Russia, knows that Ukraine saved us. Estonia used that time to prepare itself, should that "delayed" onslaught ever be unleashed, but equally the determination of Kaja Kallas, ...

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...